Lung Cam Village

On the stone plateau of Đồng Văn stands a house with a roof of mossy yin-yang tiles and a corn mill by its gate. One look at them explains why so many people come here.

The house belongs to the Mua clan. It stands in Lũng Cẩm village. The village is in Sủng Là commune, Tuyên Quang province. Formerly this land was part of Đồng Văn district, in Hà Giang province.

People often call the house the House of Pao. It was chosen as the setting for a film called Chuyện của Pao, or The Story of Pao. The film won the Cánh diều vàng, or Golden Kite, award in 2005. The house itself was built in 1947, and people still live in it.

But Lũng Cẩm is not only the story of a film.

Lũng Cẩm has long been home to the Hmong. Some Hoa households live here too. So do Nùng and Giáy families. People have lived in the Sủng Là valley for hundreds of years. They build houses with trình tường walls, make fences of hand-stacked stone, grow corn and weave linen cloth.

The strength of this village is that it has stayed true to itself. People work in tourism without trading away their architecture or their customs.

Walking into the village, a visitor finds things that few villages still keep. A small dirt path edged with stone. Yellow-brown trình tường walls, thick and solid, made from earth mixed with straw and clay. Fences of hand-stacked stone with no mortar, about chest high, curving with the shape of the valley. Roofs of blue-gray yin-yang tiles, covered in moss by the years. And the sound of corn mills, and of the khèn on festival days.

The House of Pao still has its stone-paved courtyard open to the sky, the corn mill by the gate, the mossy tile roof, and a kitchen where seed corn hangs. It is built closed on four sides, with the courtyard at the center and a thick, sturdy wooden gate. It is a complete trình tường house, the typical architecture of the Hmong on the stone plateau.

What makes it special is that it is not a museum. It is a family home. The people there still light the cooking fire. They still hang seed corn in the loft, as they have for generations.

Lũng Cẩm has another side that few visitors know about. The village and the Sủng Là area lie inside the Đồng Văn Karst Plateau UNESCO Global Geopark.

A UNESCO Global Geopark is an area with landscapes of international geological importance, managed for protection, education and sustainable development.

The plateau has a limestone karst landscape, gorges and mountain peaks, with a geological history that stretches back hundreds of millions of years. The geological heritage map of the plateau sets aside a cluster at Lũng Cẩm and Sủng Là for protection. It marks a boundary between rock layers. So the limestone slabs and cliffs around the Sủng Là valley do more than make a beautiful view. They are a page of the Earth's history, hundreds of millions of years long.

The village stands on that rock. The Hmong chose this valley to live in because it has land to farm, water running down from the mountains, and a wall of rock to shelter it from the wind. The way people have fitted their lives to the stone mountains is what makes Lũng Cẩm what it is.

Almost fifty households in the village take part in tourism. There are 32 stalls that show and sell local goods, along with homes that take in guests and cook for them. Visitors often buy woven linen cloth, cakes made from buckwheat seeds, and corn liquor made with leaf yeast. These belong to the long-standing life of the Hmong. They are not goods made only to sell to visitors.

Buckwheat flowers usually bloom in October and November, when the small fields around the village spread out in pink and purple. But the village is beautiful all year, and differently in each season. Spring brings peach and plum blossom. Summer brings green corn. Winter brings fog and slanting sunlight on the tile roofs.

Lũng Cẩm is one chapter in the larger story of the stone plateau. Other chapters are the Vương family mansion and the Lũng Cú flag tower. Another is the town of Phó Bảng. Yet Lũng Cẩm is the place that shows the real rhythm of life on this land, where people and stone mountains have leaned on each other for generations.

A small valley among stone mountains. Roofs covered in moss. The sound of the khèn in the morning. And a house of earth where people still live, standing since 1947. That is Lũng Cẩm.